Counting Heads

2.9

“Can’t you get closer?” said Inspector Costa. Easy for her to say. She had remained behind in Chicago, as per protocol. She directed this phase of the hunt from a safe, dry booth in the UDJD tower. It was Fred and another on-call HomCom officer, Reilly Dell, who were in the GOV, churning up the muck at the bottom of Lake Michigan. This was turning into a long, long Monday.

In a pinch, a HomCom General Ops Vehicle made a dandy assault car, but a poor submersible. Its cabin could pressurize to only three atmospheres, it had no air lock or ballast tanks, and none of its array of weapons performed well at the bottom of a lake. Worst of all, its six powerful Pratt and Whitney hover fans adapted poorly to water propulsion. For these reasons, Fred was less than enthusiastic about tracking down Cabinet’s new hideout.

Fred said, “I can’t seem to get clear of this turbulence.” He had submerged too deep and had disturbed the lake bed. He was trying to approach a Chicago Waterworks aquifer crib. The crib quickly sucked the cloudy water down its voracious inflow manifold, and when their visibility improved, Fred saw that they, too, were being sucked in. He fed power to the hover fans. At first the GOV responded sluggishly, but it broke free all at once and bobbed to the surface of the lake before he could compensate.

“Crap,” he muttered as the car settled on the choppy water.

“Now, now,” Costa said from her booth.

“Can’t you have them shut down the aquifer?”

“Waterworks has respectfully declined my request,” said Costa. “Two of their other cribs are off-line for maintenance. However, they’ve agreed to reduce its throughput by twenty percent, down to half a million liters per minute, but it’ll be hours before the change is noticeable.” Chicago was a thirsty city that drank eight billion liters of lake water each day.

“Let me give it a go,” Reilly Dell said from the shotgun seat. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually had some experience with this kind of driving. There’s a particular kite maneuver that should work.”

Fred passed him control of the GOV. Reilly was not only another russ, but he lived in the same APRT as Fred, and they and their wives were part of a Wednesday night crowd. Reilly took the GOV down, but not deep enough to stir up the bottom. He dropped the nose of the GOV until it was pointing straight down. He reversed the fans and gave them only enough power to offset the crib drag. Though it was uncomfortable to be hanging upside down from the seat straps and craning their necks, now they could safely observe the entire crib facility.

It looked like what it was—a giant sucking drain. The inflow manifold was a ribwork of diaron beams that strained inrushing water and filtered out anything larger than a rowboat from being pulled in and transported ninety kilometers to the lakeshore treatment plant. The manifold itself was surrounded by a slightly convex concrete apron that covered about an acre of lake bottom.

Costa said, “Good work, Reilly. Hold it right there.”

Reilly turned to Fred and made an apologetic face, but Fred shook his head. After working with Costa that morning, it was sheer pleasure for Fred to be sharing the GOV with another russ.

“By the way,” Reilly said to him, “we confirmed the table at Rolfe’s for tonight. You and Mary will be there, right?”

Fred was confused a moment. He was about to say that today wasn’t Wednesday, when he remembered the canopy retirement ceremony advertised for that evening. There was supposed to be a party and a Skytel show, and the gang was going. Fred said they’d be there, and then added, “That reminds me, you sign up for that refresher course in bloomjumping?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Reilly said, “but after coming out here today, I think I will. Does the city even know how much wild shit there is still floating around out here? Whoever came up with the idea of dropping the canopy is nuts.”

What the city maintained, what the media trumpeted, was nothing less than the end of the Outrage. In recent decades, terrorist attacks had become ineffectual and rare, or so the experts claimed. The rabid zealots of terror of the twenty-first century had been exterminated, or gone underground, or lost interest. Earth’s biosphere was now 99.99 percent nanobiohazmat free. Any residual nanobot or nanocyst still dispersed in the atmosphere or hydrosphere had gone wild, lost its virulence, and was no more lethal than hay fever. In fact, most nanocysts contained ordinary pollen, not the smallpox, marburg, or VEE they were designed to ferry. The big, region-wide filtering systems known as canopies that had once been the lifesavers of cities throughout the United Democracies were now, according to the authorities, little more than giant, very expensive air fresheners.

The two men grew silent, lost in their own thoughts, which must have followed similar lines, for when they spoke again they’d come to the same conclusion.

“They won’t be able to hire enough bloomjumpers,” Reilly said.

“We’ll be able to name our own price.”

“You still certified, Fred?”

“You bet, and I’m going to increase my rating.”

THIS MORNING WAS the first time in years that Fred had actually flown through the Chicagoland canopy. After dropping Inspector Costa off at JD headquarters, Fred had detoured to HomCom headquarters to retrieve his own GOV and to pick up another partner for the remainder of the mission. He was pleased to see Reilly’s name on the on-call roster. As the GOV sped them across town to the lake, Fred quickly briefed his brother on the morning hunt for Cabinet. They passed over the breakwaters and their floating burbs and parks and were soon over open water. On the horizon ahead, the cordon of canopy generators rose from the lake like kilometer-high reeds. Due to the diluting effect of the lake winds, the generators were spaced close together. They pumped out such a dense concentration of anti-nano that the air around them seemed to ripple.

In no time, Fred’s GOV had passed into the first canopy layer. Below them were the buoys of shipping lanes where the big lake freighters crossed the canopy.

As they flew through the outer canopy layer, they saw bright, pinpoint flashes outside the GOV windows, too numerous to count. Each flash marked a brief, intense battle between an invading nanobot or cyst and the canopy’s anti-nano defenses. The anti-nano won every time.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Fred said.

“About what you’d expect,” replied Reilly.

They passed over the floating Decon Port Authority where they would be obliged to stop on their return flight. Soon they were leaving canopied space to the great, unfiltered world beyond.

Reilly told the car to give them an auditory count of anything glomming to the outside of the GOV, and they traveled some minutes before the counter chimed. In a moment, it chimed again, but then fell silent for most of the rest of the outbound trip.

Reilly said, “ID those.”

The car replied, “Preliminary analysis identifies two gloms, both simple, one-phase carboplex disassembler nanobots.” The GOV’s frame and body were composed of carboplex—food for these particular bots—but it was covered with a tough and much less digestible diamondoid coating.

Reilly said, “Did you grease ’em?”

The car replied, “Affirmative.”

When they reached the coordinates Costa had given them and no more chimes had sounded, Fred said, “Not so bad.”

He spoke too soon, for a volley of chimes rang out. Then, after a pause, another volley, and a third. Numerous dimpled nozzles all over the car’s exterior exuded layers of heavy anti-nano grease. Here and there, the grease flashed in little, white-hot puffs as it encountered and incinerated the nanobot gloms.

Fred brought up the windshield HUD and enlarged the over and under GOV diagrams. The gloms showed up as red flags when first detected, amber when engaged by anti-nano grease, and blue when destroyed. Besides carboplex disassemblers, the gloms they were picking up included concrete, diaron, and silicate disassemblers as well. In other words, typical city-eaters.

Fred said, “Not so good.”

THE GLOM CHIMES had slowed down when they submerged. However, the anti-nano grease didn’t cover the car evenly underwater, and the little amber flags persisted for minutes before finally turning blue.

“We’ve confirmed our preliminary assessment,” Costa said. “Cabinet has an underground station here. It’s very well concealed and heat baffled, and it has tapped into the crib’s comm. You can just make it out in IR.” The windshield HUD displayed an IR overlay. There, at about eighty degrees east, at the very edge of the concrete apron, Fred saw a few wisps of fluttering ghostly ribbons. These marked exhaust heat being swallowed up in the rush of cold lake water. Starke’s hidden installation was putting out more heat than it could covertly dissipate.

“Must be working at capacity,” Fred said.

“I agree,” said Costa. “Ordinarily, it would be invisible, but now it’s trying to run Starke Enterprises from down there.”

“How did you find it?” Reilly said.

“Through snitches, of course,” said Costa. “From about a thousand of Cabinet’s closest friends. We were tipped off as soon as it went active. Mentars are their own worst enemies.”

Reilly gave Fred a look like—doesn’t she know there’s about a million mentars listening in?

Fred cleared his throat and said, “So, what do we do now, Inspector? Go after it?” He wasn’t too eager to tackle the waterworks crib in a GOV.

“No, we wait for the dredge to arrive. In the meantime, we’ve equipped one of the crib maintenance arbeitors with a probe. We’re releasing it now.”

Under the ribwork, a crablike mech was working its way around the manifold. It had a low-slung body and six wiry legs. It moved across the concrete apron with surprising agility by pulling itself against the suction along a grid of recessed D-ring grips. It traveled to the very edge of the apron, near a boulder where the waste heat seemed to originate, and reeled out a thin rod to probe the boulder. But when the probe made contact with the rock, there was an explosive flash, several of the arbeitor’s legs lost their grip, and the arbeitor’s body was whipped toward the intake. For a moment it hung from two legs, but these were torn away, and it bounced off the ribwork and disappeared down the gullet of the crib.

Reilly said, “Drink that, Chicago.”

Costa said, “Looks like this backup’s got teeth. I guess we might as well wait for the dredge. How you boys doing?”

Fred consulted Reilly with a glance and said, “We’re fine.”

“I see no need for you to be hanging upside down like that. We can watch through the cameras now; I doubt Cabinet is going anywhere. Why don’t you level the car out.”

Fred said, “What’s the ETA on the dredge?”

“Twenty minutes, and an hour for deployment.”

Fred consulted life support and power stores. Their trip out had consumed only a fraction of the GOV’s supply. Again he polled Reilly with a glance. Reilly yawned.

The life of a russ seemed to involve untold hours of keeping watch in uncomfortable positions. But russes had a high threshold for discomfort and an uncanny tolerance for boredom.

“We’re fine the way we are for now.”

And so they waited. The GOV’s glom monitor chimed every few minutes, unsettling Fred each time it did. He watched for each new red flag to turn amber and then blue. Before long, there was a louder chime. A red flag was blinking—there was a glom that the anti-nano grease could not reach. It was lodged in the door frame, one of the few seams in the GOV’s otherwise unibody construction. Fred and Reilly watched the blinking red flag for several long minutes. Eventually, the car said, “Protocol suggests surfacing and preparing for evacuation.”

Fred thought about it and said, “That might be wise.”

“Not to mention smart,” said Reilly.

Costa said, “What kind of bot is it?”

“Unknown,” Fred said, “until the grease can reach it.”

“Then why don’t you do as your car advises and come up.”

Fred nodded to Reilly, who righted the car and powered it to the surface. He released control of the GOV back to its subem pilot, which hovered the car a meter over the lake surface.

Almost at once, the glom flag stopped blinking and turned amber—the anti-nano grease had engaged the bot. The glom was a three-phase nanobot, a Nanotech Assault Engine, or NASTIE. Fred and Reilly stared at each other openmouthed.

Reilly said, “You don’t see many of those anymore,” and unbuckled himself from his seat. He went back to the passenger compartment.

Costa said, “You should evacuate immediately. Deploy the raft.”

Fred said, “Aye, aye, preparing to ditch.”

Reilly said, “Heads up,” and tossed Fred a pouch of VIS-37 from the refrigerator. The two russes made identical sour faces as they popped open their pouches, raised a silent toast, and forced down the vilest, most intrusive of all the emergency visolas. It turned Fred’s stomach. Reilly belched and went back to the passenger compartment.

Suddenly the NASTIE’s amber flag turned blue—bot killed, crisis averted. When Reilly returned with the rescue raft cassette and their kit bags, he looked at the glom display and said, “Well, hell.”

The two men watched the display for a while. Finally, Reilly said, “You still want to ditch or what?”

Fred said, “We could just eyeball that door frame real close.”

Reilly said, “I’ll do that,” and went aft again.

“Take your grease gun,” Fred called after him.

Reilly returned and got it from his kit bag.

Costa said, “What’s going on?”

Fred said, “Our NASTIE is dead. We’re going to stay aboard. Where’s your dredge?”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“Anybody object?”

None of the monitoring mentars spoke up. Such decisions were usually left to the humans in the field.

Fred rotated the GOV to face the city, but they didn’t have enough altitude to make out either the shoreline or the picket of canopy generators from this distance. Suddenly something startled him. Someone was standing right in front of his windshield.

It was Cabinet, the old lady chief of staff who had earlier addressed the UD General Assembly. She looked directly at Fred and said, May I have a few private words with you?

Nicholas, the Applied People mentar, said, “Commander Londenstane, what was that?”

The old lady outside the GOV raised a thin finger to her lips. They cannot sense me. We are pointcasting directly to you. Please tell them everything is fine.

Instead, Fred said, “What was what?”

“Your heart rate just spiked.”

Fred hesitated. “Nothing,” he said at last. “I was just thinking about how little you pay me for this shit.”

BB of R Marcus said, “Do you require a privileged brotherhood conversation?”

“No, Marcus, thanks. I was thinking about a personal matter. Something at home. I’m not thinking about it anymore, so let’s all just drop it, okay?”

Excellent, said Cabinet. We have a brief message for you, so please lend us your generous russ attention.

Fred didn’t like this one bit, but he played along. At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering how Cabinet was able to communicate with him right under the noses of some of the most sophisticated mentars in the world. And to commandeer his HUD, for that matter, for surely there were no emitters in the middle of Lake Michigan. Fred didn’t lock his gaze on the apparition but swept his eyes across the horizon as though searching for the approaching dredge. He found the dredge too, a small dark bump on the horizon.

We will never forget the compassion you showed our family in our time of great need all those years ago. We realize that compassion is a famous russ trait, but in you it runs deeper than in most. In other fine ways as well, you seem a remarkably gifted man.

Fred thought, Yah, sure.

Our current situation is desperate, it went on, and we are compelled once again to seek your compassion. We have a special request to make of you.

Fred glanced at the woman on his windshield. Surely, it couldn’t expect him to assist in its escape.

Ellen Starke, our late sponsor’s daughter, was a baby when you were assigned to guard the Starke family. This morning she was critically injured in the attack that took the life of her mother. We fear that whoever assassinated Eleanor will not allow Ellen to survive. If we are taken into custody, even for a brief period of time, Ellen will surely die.

Fred experienced a sudden rush of anger at this dead aff’s mentar. How dare it try to manipulate him?

Nicholas broke in again, “Sorry to return to this, Commander, but your stress levels continue to rise. Yet, we see nothing in your immediate environment to cause it. Do you believe, perhaps, that the NASTIE that has invaded your car is still viable? If so, you should request the Command to send a car to pick you up.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Or a decon team,” Nicholas continued.

This took Fred aback. That was why Nicholas was watching him so closely. It thought he was already infected by nano. He quickly said, “Listen, Nick, Marcus, Costa, Libby, Nameless One, and whoever else is out there copying. Such minute attention to my inner state of harmony is hampering my concentration on the matter at hand.”

“Understood,” said Nicholas. “Carry on.”

Fred said, “But a backup car might be a good idea. Nameless One, please dispatch a GOV.”

“Nameless One reports that it dispatched a GOV five minutes ago,” Marcus said. “ETA is sixteen minutes.”

Myr Londenstane, Cabinet continued, Ellen needs me to watch over her while she is defenseless.

So call Applied People and hire bodyguards, Fred wanted to reply. I’m not allowed to take on private jobs. But Fred knew Cabinet wasn’t asking to hire him. It was asking for a personal favor. Fred wanted to know when had they become so chummy. He had worked for Eleanor Starke for six months in 2092 and ’93. Her household consisted of herself, baby Ellen, and the freshly seared and emotionally shipwrecked Samson Harger. All the other domestics and guards avoided Harger because he was morbidly depressed and because he stank so bad. Fred simply felt sorry for the man. It was no big deal. Yet, when it came time for Fred to rotate to another assignment, Governor Starke, herself, threw a going-away party for him. In aff households, this was unheard of. In all his years, he’d not seen the likes of it. They’d even baked him a cake. And they’d given him a little gift—house slippers, and a slipper puppy to care for them.

We implore you. Are you willing to help Ellen survive?

Damn you, Fred thought. Still, he did not immediately expose the apparition, as he knew he must. His duty was clear; he was a russ after all, but the soulless mentar had found the perfect wedge—not his compassion, which it kept harping on, but a russ’s most highly prized and most commercially valuable quality, his sense of loyalty. Doggish loyalty that, apparently, had no expiration date.

I cannot allow the authorities to dig up the lake bed. The inspector correctly identifies this as my last backup. However, it’s not housed in the facility you have located. That is a decoy. Before the excavator arrives, I implore you to capture the decoy as though it were the real backup. I can tell you how to safely do this and still make it look genuine. In this way we can turn back the excavator. Nod your head, and I will proceed to give you instructions.

The slippers had worn out long ago, but he still had the slipper puppy. And for that he was going to violate his oath of office? Just what kind of russ did this mentar think he was—defective? “Costa,” he said, “is that the dredge I see approaching?”

“Affirmative, Londenstane. It’s still ten minutes out.”

Fred knew where his duty lay, and yet he hesitated. The mentars, Nick and Libby and especially the Nameless One, might already know of his private comm, might be testing him, giving him enough rope. So why was he drawing it out? Perhaps he had been infected by the NASTIE!

“Costa,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Costa, ah—” Fred cleared his throat and thought about what a good life he had: Mary and their friends, his high rank at Applied People and all, how he loved his job. If only Cabinet had made it easier for him by trying to bribe or threaten him.

“Go ahead, Londenstane,” Costa repeated.

Fred locked eyes with the lady in the lake. What did he owe the Starkes anyway?

“Um, Fred?” Reilly said from behind him.

Fred turned and craned his neck to see into the aft compartment. Reilly was crouched next to the starboard door, watching it through his cap visor.

“I see residual heat in IR,” Reilly said. “But it’s taking a godawful long time to dissipate.”

Fred said, “That’s enough. I’m setting this bird down. Prepare to ditch.” When he turned back to the controls, Cabinet’s image was gone, but so were half of the HUD displays. “Car,” Fred said, “put down on the lake surface.”

At first there was no helm response, but then the hover fans quit abruptly, and the GOV fell nose first into the water, and Fred was thrown against his harness.

“Commander!” Reilly said.

“Hang on, Dell. It’s already infiltrated our control system. Better go NBC.”

“Way ahead of you, skipper.”

Fred ordered his own blacksuit to deploy its full NBC isolation mode. Gloves sprang from his sleeves, a soft mask dropped from his cap visor, and the visor’s own HUD came online. The velvety blacksuit fabric turned shiny as it sweated anti-nano grease. He could taste bottled air as the suit inflated, giving it a slight positive pressure. His air gauge said he had two hours of air at one atmosphere.

“Libby,” he said, “tell Nameless One we’re about to execute an emergency evacuation.”

No response.

“Anyone out there hear me?”

The car had ceased relaying his comm. They were on their own. Gingerly, he touched the control panel—everything aboard had to be considered hot. The panel was dead. And not only was the GOV sinking, but it was being drawn slowly toward the mouth of the crib manifold.

“I’ve got a dead stick,” Fred said, unbuckling himself from his seat.

“Wait’ll you see what I’ve got,” Reilly replied.

Fred went through the companionway and was stunned by what he saw. The passenger compartment was in full bloom. The glom entry site at the starboard door was a furnace of molecular activity. A tough sack, like a living scab, covered it, glowing with inner heat and bulging ever larger. Its mop head of colorless microtendrils crisscrossed throughout the compartment, dissolving everything they touched and feeding a molecular mush to the main assembler under the scab. A NASTIE was the ultimate agent of opportunity, programmed to make the best use of whatever materials it found. In the GOV it had found a treasure trove of rare and restricted material: munitions, power plant and fuel, and the pilot subem and military-grade cables, sensors, processors, not to mention the living tissue of two russes. There was no telling what sort of assault weapon it could fashion from all these pieces.

Reilly was crouched against the port side door with a grease gun, melting the advancing microtendrils with little squirts of anti-nano. But they advanced as thick as cotton candy, and parts of his suit were scorched and brittle, and the raw meat of his flesh showed through. His blacksuit kept trying to cover his exposed skin with battlewrap, but the tendrils ate this too. Reilly was boxed in too tight to move. He’d never make it forward to the driver’s cab in one piece. But with any luck, he’d be able to open the door at his shoulder.

Fred had to step back to avoid the tendrils snaking through the companionway. His suit’s cooling unit cycled on to counteract the increasing air temperature in the GOV. He shouted over the noisy hiss, “We don’t want to flood with lake water, do we?”

“Do it anyway,” Reilly shouted back.

“I’ll need you to work your door.”

Fred retreated to the cab, grabbed up the raft cassette from the floor, and clipped it to his belt. He opened his weapons kit, found his own grease gun, and clipped that on too. The GOV’s dashboard and control panels were sagging like melted chocolate. Fred pulled on a second pair of gloves and quickly rummaged through his kit to see if there was anything else he could use. He hated leaving the kits to the NASTIE, but there was no alternative.

Glancing out the window, Fred was shocked to see how close to the crib they had drifted. He prodded the seat frame with his discarded visola pouch to test how solid it was. In order to reach the escape hatch, he’d have to either sit in the seat or unlatch and move it aside. It seemed soft, so he unlocked it from its base and let it fall away.

Reilly moaned.

The escape hatch control was self-contained, not tied into the GOV subem, so it might still be uncontaminated. “Hatch, I declare an emergency and order you to open,” he said.

No response.

Fred grabbed the manual latch and turned it. Though the handle bent in his hand, it still worked, and the hatch undogged and swung inward. A torrent of water poured in, knocking him over and flooding the cab. The cold water quickly reached the nano furnace in the rear and exploded into superheated steam. Fred’s suit squealed a warning, and he ducked under the rising water. He hoped Reilly’s suit could keep him from getting cooked. After a moment, the water level had risen enough for him to pull himself through the hatch. His suit now hugged his body, and a mouthpiece popped up inside his mask. He wrapped his lips around it and took a deep breath. The air gauge reset itself to account for the depth. Because of the pressure, his two hours of air had dropped to forty minutes.

Fred kicked aft to the GOV’s port side passenger door. Reilly had unlatched it, but it seemed welded to the frame. Fred grabbed the handle, braced his feet against the side of the car, and pulled. He tore the softened door from its weakened frame, and out came Reilly in a gush of steamy bubbles.

A rope of tendrils followed him out, wrapped around his knee. Behind his mask, Reilly’s mouth was stretched in agony. Fred took Reilly’s grease gun and tried to cut the tendrils, but the gun was empty. He grabbed his own gun and cut them with a ribbon of grease. The tendrils encircling Reilly’s leg, however, continued to digest his suit and send out tendrils of their own. Fred wrapped his partner’s entire knee with ribbons of grease. When he looked into Reilly’s mask, he saw that Reilly had passed out before taking the breathing regulator into his mouth. He would asphyxiate, and there was nothing Fred could do except get him to the surface as quickly as possible. He unreeled his belt tether, clipped it to the ring at the back of Reilly’s collar, grabbed him around the waist, and pushed off from the GOV. Fred kicked and paddled furiously, but it was no good: the crib suction was too strong and Reilly’s limp body too cumbersome. They continued to vector diagonally toward the big strainer at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He hadn’t even managed to pull away from the GOV.

Fred changed course. If it wasn’t possible to swim straight up, maybe he could reach the lake bed before being sucked in. There’d be less pull on the ground, and he could clamber away on the rocky bottom. His air supply alarm went off. He’d been working too hard and breathing too heavily, and his air supply dipped below fifteen minutes.

Fred relaxed completely, letting the water pull him and Reilly down. He tried to visualize all the gear packed into these HomCom blacksuits to see if there was something he could use to save their lives. It had been years since he’d certified in them, and he only got to use one every month or so. He asked himself, Do I have any spare air on board? and quieted his thoughts for an answer. He got one too, and would have slapped himself on the head if he could spare a hand. Yes, he had spare air. He had a whole freaking cassette of liquid air.

Fred tore the raft cassette from his belt and tethered it to Reilly. Now they were strung together with Reilly in the middle. When he pulled the inflate ring, the ultrathin foil billowed out into the shape of a flat donut, more deflated than inflated. They couldn’t be more than thirty meters down, about three atmospheres, but the water pressure squeezed the raft’s air to a third of its volume. Even so, the raft was buoyant enough to offset the crib suction. At least for Reilly’s weight. Fred still had to raise his own weight by swimming.

The GOV seemed to fall away below them as Fred put everything he had into his arms and legs. The mirrorlike underside of the lake surface was tauntingly close when his air supply gave out. By then they’d risen enough for the raft to fill out, and soon it was racing for the surface with the two men in tow. Fred exhaled a seemingly endless breath of decompressing air from his lungs. They were rising too fast, he knew, and might suffer the bends when they surfaced, but there was nothing to do about that now.

At least the crib was safely distant, and the GOV a mere toy car. It struck the manifold ribworks and broke apart like a rotten egg, spilling its deadly yolk into the aquifer.

Fred thought, Drink that, Chicago.

When they broke the surface, Fred opened his face mask and sucked in sweet lungsful of air. Reilly floated faceup next to him. His eyelids and lips were blue, and Fred fished in his cargo pocket for a laser pen. He would have to cut the mask off Reilly and start mouth to mouth.

Three blobs of blue fell into the water next to Fred, and it took him a panicky moment to recognize them as a Technical Escort Team in gummysuits. A decon ambulance hovered a few meters overhead. A voice rang out from it, “Relax, Commander. We’ll take it from here.”

AT THE PORT Authority Decon Unit, Fred lay at the bottom of a two-thousand-liter HALVENE tank. He had plenty of time to relax as the concentrated lipoprotein solvent permeated his body. It flushed him of the dead crap that the VIS-37 visola had killed and the live crap it had missed.

Fred lay perfectly still, not even breathing. There was no need to breathe: the HALVENE was capable of oxygenating his cells. It was best not to move at all, for the cellular bonds of his tissues were loosened. Violent motion, such as gagging or coughing, could literally shake him to pieces. Besides, it felt good not to breathe. He’d never realized what an effort breathing took.

FRED’S PALLET AT the bottom of the tank began to rise. Apparently, he was done, stripped, clean. The pallet lifted him a couple of centimeters out of the HALVENE bath and stopped. The solvent streamed out of him as though he were a sopping rag hung out to dry. He was saturated with the stuff and weighed three times normal. They’d leave him here to drip dry until his weight returned to twenty percent over normal. Then it would be safe for him to move. This might take another hour. Plenty of time for second-guessing.

Fred was besieged by self-doubt. He found himself dwelling on things he’d never given a second thought to before. Like this hinky woman, Costa.

Fred stopped himself right there. They warned you about having woodies in the HALVENE tank. You could literally burst your plumbing.

So he thought about his little private chat with Cabinet at the lake. What exactly had it expected to accomplish by singling him out? Did it actually think he would betray his duty? Russes were extraordinarily loyal to their duty. This was what made them an invaluable asset in the security sector. And it was the reason why his urbrother, Thomas A., was chosen a century ago to serve as donor for the very first line of commercially developed clones. The original russ, Secret Service Special Agent Thomas A. Russ, had thrown himself on a carpet mine in the Oval Office to save the life of President Taksayer in 2034 during the fifth assassination attempt against her in a one-week period.

The grateful president, bloodied but undaunted, scooped up a gob of Thomas A.’s brains in a cracked china cup with the presidential seal and proclaimed to the media, “If loyalty can be cloned, let this be its template.” Thus were the commercial clone treaties passed, and such was the standard every russ strove to imitate. So what was Cabinet’s game?

Obviously, the mentar was in a tight spot with Starke’s daughter; it was clutching at smoke and would do anything to protect her. But what did it mean when it said that he was an exceptional russ, that he possessed traits unusual for a russ? It should have come right out and said it—he had fallen out of type—for that was what it was implying. And Cabinet made this assertion based on what? his six-month stint in the Starke household forty years ago?

Fred shook his head, spilling HALVENE from his ears. His hunch was that it was all bluff. Cabinet didn’t really imagine that it could sway him. It was a stab in the dark. Surely, that was all it was.

On the other hand, how did you really know what a mentar was thinking? Though the mentar brain was modeled on a human original, it was still an alien thing. Fred knew the typical hi-index specs, and since he didn’t have anywhere to go, he listed them: axodendritic neurons ten times richer in microtubules (generating a hundred times the quantum flux per cubic millimeter) with no need for ionic pumps to create a voltaic differential (almost eliminating the latency period between neural firings), and a thousand times the density of synaptic junctions (that could close their synaptic gaps completely for brief periods of hardwired, superfast cognition). The mentar paste was more complex, stable, redundant, flexible, and robust than his own sloppy grayware. It could distribute its attention units to cover thousands of cognition tasks simultaneously. It could interface directly with an array of electronic devices: archives, cams and emitters, arbeitors, and superluminary and quantum processors. It could be stored, backed up, and mirrored. It could freely migrate to different media. The various subunits of the mentar brain slept in shifts and could watch itself dream. It never took vacations, never got sick, never had a documented case of headache. And with the exception of Marcus, any mentar that Fred met was more likely to be his boss rather than the other way around.

But what if he was, in fact, falling out of type? What if he was suffering from the dreaded “clone fatigue” that everyone was jabbering about lately? How would he know? Who could he ask? Marcus? If he so much as breathed a word of his self-doubts to the brotherhood mentar, it would force him to undergo psychiatric evaluation, something to avoid. Perhaps he could do his own research without telling Marcus. There were whole libraries dedicated to the russ germline: genanalyses, life performance studies, behavioral studies, biographies, as well as a substantial body of popular vids. He could research all aspects of himself, at least from an outside perspective. Russes weren’t into self-analysis, and why was that? As far as Fred knew, no russ had ever set down a first-person account of what it was like to be a russ. Other types did. Evangelines published poetry. Every evangeline did this, even Mary. To write poetry was an urge rooted at the core of their germline. And lulus kept a history, too, of sorts. They hosted bawdy burlesques for their salon on the WAD, which people actually paid to access. Even the jeromes, the tight-ass, bean-counting jeromes like Gilles, kept a history. Or at least that was the rumor. They had a so-called Book of Jerome to which any jerome could contribute and which only jeromes could access. And of course there were the famous, but equally exclusive, Jenny Boards.

The russes had their Heads-Up Log, it was true. The HUL was a sort of history, maybe. Fred decided he’d have to spend some time browsing through it at the BB of R Hall. It might shed some light.

ENOUGH HALVENE DRAINED from Fred’s body so that his brain stem registered hypoxia, and his lungs spontaneously resumed breathing. It surprised him; he’d grown used to not breathing. With breathing came the ability to speak out loud, and the mentar Nicholas took this opportunity to ask him how he felt.

Fred had to gently hack and spit a little before he could answer. “I’m fine,” he said at last. “How’s Reilly Dell?”

“I’m sorry, Myr Londenstane, but that’s privileged information.”

So it was back to Myr Londenstane. His shift as HomCom commander was over, and with it his privileges to information. He’d have to wait and see Reilly himself, and even then they wouldn’t be free to discuss today’s action. The damned Applied People client confidentiality oath.

Fred said, “Let me speak to him.”

“That’s not possible at the moment.” This probably meant they were still patching him up.

“What time is it?”

“Fifteen-ten.”

“So early?”

Marcus joined the conversation. “Don’t worry, Fred,” it said. “You will be paid for a full duty cycle plus combat differential plus a decontamination bonus.”

“Yippee,” Fred said. “I should do this more often.”

The mentars made no reply, perhaps because they didn’t register his sarcasm, or perhaps because they did. In any case, if they weren’t going to tell him what he most wanted to know—Reilly’s condition—then he didn’t feel like talking to them. He felt like hell, actually. Like he’d been swimming in acetone. He could only imagine what Reilly must feel like.

FRED TOYED WITH the notion of writing the true history of russdom. He wasn’t actually going to do it—that would be proof positive that he’d jumped the tracks, but as he lay suspended over the Decon Port Authority swamp tank, it was an interesting mental exercise. This was how he would begin: To my cloned brothers: from our first days in russ school, we are trained to lay down our lives for our employers, but have we ever stopped to ask—are they worthy of us?

THE PALLET FERRIED him to the catwalk. He pulled himself to his feet and held the railing until the vertigo passed. There were five dozen HALVENE tanks in this room, none of them now occupied. The escort team must have taken Reilly to a critical care room, one with hernandez tanks, in order to repair his injuries while douching him.

Fred padded to the dressing room. On a bench was a freshly extruded Applied People teal and brown jumpsuit, shoes, and a belt, all his size. The belt had a valet buckle. He’d have to use it or a skullcap until the HALVENE had dissipated from his tissues and he could grow a new inbody comm system. For that matter, since the solvent had removed his good nano, as well as the bad, he’d have to go through the whole time-consuming balancing act of reintroducing colonies of homeostats into his metabolism. A decon bonus didn’t even start to cut it for him.

Fred picked up the jumpsuit. There was no point in taking a shower—he was already cleaner than clean. And he would smell of HALVENE for the next week in any case. He turned at a sound behind him, expecting to see Reilly. But it was a woman. It was UDJD Probate Inspector Costa. He covered himself with a towel, more out of pique than modesty.

“Myr Londenstane,” she said, “it’s nice to see you up and around and no worse for wear. I wanted to drop by and personally assure myself of your condition.”

“What about Lieutenant Dell?” The question just slipped out, but Costa was under no Applied People confidentiality constraints. What she chose to divulge was her and her agency’s business.

“Dell’s doing fine. He’s in rapid tissue regeneration. He’ll need some new leg muscles.”

“Thank you. I’m good, then,” Fred said and glanced down at his bare feet. He was standing in a small puddle of HALVENE that had pooled inside his feet and was leaking from between his toes.

“What about all that hot shit that got sucked into the aquifer?” he said. “Won’t that contaminate the city’s water supply?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. That system was built sixty years ago during the Outrage. It’s designed to deal with NASTIES. Chicago’s water is safe.”

“What about our city once the canopy comes down?”

Costa shrugged her shoulders. “How should I know?

“Anyway, I wanted to compliment you on your excellent job today,” she continued, “though I must say, things turned out unexpectedly.”

“Oh?” he said.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but the facility we found next to the crib was only a decoy.”

“Are you sure?” Fred said. “A decoy?”

“Yes, the excavator dug up the real Cabinet a couple hundred meters away.”

So Cabinet was in custody. Fred could feel his blood pressure rise and was glad Nicholas couldn’t read him now.

“Congratulations, Inspector. A fine job,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Was it scrambled?” he added hopefully.

She shook his hand with a crooked smile. “How many times do I have to tell you, the last one can’t harm itself.”

“So it’s going through probate?”

“Kicking and screaming, but already out the other side. And now everything is fine, just like I said, and it can’t believe that it put up such a fuss.”

Costa stopped talking and gave him a funny look. Here it comes, Fred thought, the end of my career. He glanced at the towel he was still holding and Costa turned her back so that he could finish dressing.

“And did you interrogate it?” he asked.

“Libby did, yes.” He waited for her to continue, but she said, “Anyway, today’s mission was one for the books, wouldn’t you say, Londenstane?”

“A thrill a minute, Inspector.”